Students had two and a half days to create a new app or program from scratch and just three minutes to wow the judges at the UC Santa Cruz Hackathon.

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The innovations included a drone that delivers much needed supplies, voice-controlled robots and a different application for virtual reality.

Shivani Vaidya, a sophomore at UCSC, was part of the team that created the voice-controlled robots.

"I feel like the application for this can be used, basically, in any place where humans have to work with robots such as in warehouses, in agriculture and it can also be used in the military," she said.

"We are trying to change that whole playing field of how humans interact with robots," said her partner for the challenge, Avi Varshney.

The team behind "Focus VR" applied what they are studying in school to their project.

"There are lot of studies that have shown that if you study in multiple environments and you take a test in a neutral environment, you'll get better results than if you studied twice in the same environment," said UCSC student Jeremy Saal.

His team decided to take advantage of existing virtual reality equipment for their project.

"We've created this virtual workspace. It can have PDFs of your textbook come up so you can sit in there and read in a really calming environment," said Azad Balabanian. "Not only that, you also have a white board that you can write on just by using a pencil. You can track that and write whatever you want on it."

Their entry won first place in the Innovation category, taking home over $8,000 in prizes, including support to further develop their idea.

"It's really great," Saal said. "It's really one of the first times I used all the knowledge that we've had and just combined it and it's really fun to see how it all turned out."